John Besh

Tonight centers around one special author: Amy Tan will be receiving Litquake's Barbary Coast Award for her contribution to the Bay Area literary community. You may know Tan as the author of Asian-American identity stories like The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, but there are a few things you might not know about her: she's written an opera libretto (for the adaptation of The Bonesetter's Daughter, performed in SF last year), once had a PBS children's series (based on her Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat), and has a master's in linguistics (from San Jose State).